Houston – Oil giant Exxon Mobil topped its own record for the biggest annual profit by a U.S. company last year, with earnings that amounted to $4.5 million an hour for the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.

It reported the record net income – $39.5 billion – despite a 4 percent drop in earnings in the final three months of 2006, as prices for oil and natural gas fell from extraordinary levels earlier in the year.

Lower commodity prices may linger for at least the first part of 2007, even as the cost of doing business rises because of factors such as a shortage of drilling equipment and labor.

So while big players like Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips – first, second and third, respectively, among integrated U.S. oil companies – are expected to continue to rake in piles of cash, the totals aren’t likely to be the eye-popping amounts of recent quarters.

“I’d say overall, if you look for earnings to decline 5 to 15 percent from the huge highs this past year, you’re probably going to see most of these companies fall within that range,” said John Parry, a senior analyst at energy consulting firm John S. Herold Inc.

Exxon Mobil and its predecessor companies have been producing natural gas in western Colorado’s Piceance Basin for 50 years. The company recently announced that it will expand the 300,000-acre Piceance operations with more wells, pipelines and a central processing plant. The improvements carry an estimated value of $500 million.

The company had established a major oil- shale extraction project on the Western Slope before suddenly dropping the $5 billion Colony project and laying off 2,200 workers when oil prices fell in 1982.

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